Your clients could be overlooking an important component of digital marketing. Specifically, reputation management is playing a bigger role for large marketers that track how well their local operations are doing. Street Fight’s latest survey covered reputation and review management. Here’s what they found, especially at it pertains to negative reviewers.

Managing a business's online reputation is not easy. It takes time to respond to positive reviews. Your clients need to soothe the unhappy customers who post negative reviews. And, then there's the question of how far they should go to maintain their reputations.

All this effort appears to be worthwhile. Businesses that engage in managing their reputations have a more positive outlook. Managers in these businesses gave their local digital marketing tactics higher effectiveness than all marketers combined.

How Reputation Management Impacts Marketing Outcomes

For managers who use reputation management tactics, the following percentages say their local digital marketing tactics are very effective. (Percentages for all businesses appear in parentheses.)

• Brand awareness 23% (19%)
• Increasing conversion/​sales 23% (18%)
• Customer retention/​loyalty 33% (25%)
• Customer support 22% (21%)
• Increased lifetime customer value 24% (19%)

Reputation Management Guidelines

The good news is businesses are looking for reputation management help. About 1/​3 of businesses handle reputation management with a combination of their own staff members and outside help. Not surprisingly, social media specialists are the most frequent source of outside help. Businesses also turn to ad agencies and specialized review-​response services for this need.

Your clients should also understand the metrics other businesses are using to measure their reputation management efforts. Findings from the Street Fight survey suggest businesses:

• Try to respond to every review 33%
• Try to respond to most reviews 33%
• Respond only to negative reviews 18%
• Respond to reviews with custom response 33%
• Respond to negative reviews with custom response 25%
• Respond to negative reviews with custom offer 12%
• Respond to reviews within a specific time 20%
• Don’t respond to any reviews 6%

To help your clients understand their online reputations, run a Digital Audit on them. The tool is available at AdMall from SalesFuel​.com. Review your findings with them and sell them on your services.